The first thing Joseph Fiennes does, when we meet at London’s National Theatre so I can quiz him about playing England manager Gareth Southgate on stage, is quiz me about England manager Gareth Southgate. This is disconcerting, but understandable. Fiennes has yet to meet Southgate, having had to make do with YouTube. I’ve interviewed Southgate, albeit for half an hour a couple of years ago.
Did you like him, Fiennes asks? Did anything stand out? What was he like?
To which I can only mutter: yes, not really, and… um, he’s exactly the person you expect him to be, which is rarer than you might imagine. In Southgate’s case: nice, thoughtful, an interesting mix of self-possession and inherent shyness. Er, did I mention he was nice?
Fiennes says, “Huh, interesting,” yet his face says he should have stuck to YouTube. I suspect I have not greatly altered his performance.
The play, Dear England, is written by James Graham, otherwise known as the person behind every incredible drama of the last few years that wasn’t either Fleabag or Succession (take your pick from Brexit: The Uncivil War, Quiz, or last year’s Sherwood).
It is not, Fiennes is keen to point out as we sit down for dinner at the National Theatre’s new white tablecloth restaurant Lasdun, a biography of the England manager, but a study of national identity: how Southgate reformed the laddish locker-room culture, gave agency to players who no longer felt they had to “stick to football”, spoke out when his players faced racist abuse, and tried to take the nation along with him. “He’s reformed, reclaimed, built a new England,” says Fiennes, “and I think he really understood, post-Brexit, post-pandemic, the England of today is not the England he grew up in. The players and their identity within a team are forever shifting.”
It will also, he says, be funny. “It’s slightly caricature, so I don’t feel the weight of carrying this portrayal. I want to do it justice, and there are aspects of Gareth I hope I might have got right in some way, but the piece itself is bigger than one person.”
In rehearsals, the cast were categorised by their levels of football fandom: the As, obsessives “who could tell you Robert Barker was England’s goalkeeper in 1873 or whatever”, the Bs, more casual fans, and the Cs, who don’t follow football at all. Fiennes is a B. “I am a fan,” he says, noting he supports Chelsea. “Have I ever cried? No.”
Graham first began thinking of Southgate’s story as a play as far back as the 2018 World Cup penalty shootout win against Colombia. It was a single result, but felt like the culmination of a broader shift. How had that happened?
“I really like telling stories of institutions that go through radical and disruptive transformation,” he told me, “whether it’s the Vote Leave campaign coming from nowhere and winning the referendum [in Brexit: The Uncivil War] or Rupert Murdoch taking over the Sun newspaper [in his play Ink]. And the transformation of England was extraordinary.”
By the time Covid hit, and the racism England’s penalty-takers suffered after their shootout defeat to Italy in the final of Euro 2020, he realised a play about England could “be a way of looking at those hot-button issues, but through the prism of a changing room”.
Graham did, however, admit a concern. He sat down with Southgate for an hour to inform the play and the England manager was as decent and authentic as he’d imagined. The only problem: those things don’t tend to make great drama: “Yes, and I think the challenge for James is we’re in a theatre known for great big Shakespearean plays, warriors with swords in the air. Here it’s also someone trying to gain glory for England, but in a gentler, more emotionally intelligent way. How do you make that epic?”
Fiennes tells me the play has just undergone “massive rewrites”. Ideally, he says, he’d want another month of rehearsals, rather than opening in two weeks.
coat by Yohji Yamamoto (theshopyohjiyamamoto.com); shirt by Maryam Nassir Zadeh (matchesfashion.com); trousers by Zegna (mytheresa.com) and shoes by grenson.com. Photograph: Zoe McConnell/The Observer
When I ask him what struck him most about watching Southgate in his research, he mentions one thing above all others: “Control.”
It doesn’t seem overly significant – he’s a football manager after all – until we get on to the subject of Harvey Weinstein, when it very much does.
In person, Fiennes manages to be both intense – all eye contact and eyebrows, questions literally leant into – and serenely still. Limbs are moved with the specificity of Jenga pieces. Brows are furrowed in a way rarely seen outside competitive wine tastings. He lives in Mallorca with his Spanish wife, the artist Maria Dolores Dieguez, and their two bilingual daughters, and says he feels more European than British.
If playing Southgate presents its own kind of challenge, it’s also, Fiennes says, something of a relief. After four seasons playing sadistic patriarch Fred Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale – a role in which those eyebrows were often turned up to 11, netting an Emmy nomination in the process – the offers since have been rather specific.
“Now it’s all bearded Machiavellian patriarchs,” he says. “It always swings one way if it’s successful, because it’s a good safe bet. And I’m having to fight that now. So it is refreshing to get to the wonderful Gareth in that way.” It was the same, Fiennes says, after his early breakthrough roles in Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love in his mid-20s: “It was all flouncy shirts and horses for the next decade.”
Fiennes’s most recent film The Mother, a so-so Netflix action film co-starring Jennifer Lopez that was released last month, is a case in point. An early scene sees Fiennes’s ex-SAS arms smuggler stab Lopez’s heavily pregnant military operative in the stomach, seemingly murdering an unborn child that was likely his. In so far as evil patriarchs go, it was up there. He was, in fairness, clean-shaven.
I ask Fiennes what the scene was like to film, as it was pretty horrendous to watch.
“I know, talk about abhorrent behaviour. I mean, I’m amazed no one has spoken about that, I’m honestly shocked it hasn’t caused discussion. I found it difficult – I wondered if we should even see it. We had quite a bit of discussion about it. Maybe it should be implied? I was nervous about how it would be received.”
It wasn’t, he tells me candidly, the film he intended to make. “There’s a lot that’s not there [in the final cut]. A lot of the reasoning of the character is not there. It’s a device that puts the audience firmly in believing this person is evil. There’s no subtlety.”
When he was filming The Handmaid’s Tale, Fiennes was able to push back when he felt a scene was going too far – notably lobbying against a rape scene he felt was particularly egregious, sending the producers a series of long emails to make his case. It is, he points out, the difference between starring in a long-running TV show and making a one-off film project: how much of a voice you have and how much control.
“It’s a different collaboration. You get more of a voice if it’s been running a few years on television. In film you’re locked off. When the politburo says that’s it, that’s it.”
While we’re on the subject of suspect decision-making, I tell Fiennes I have to ask him about his decision to play Michael Jackson in 2016. Granted, it was hardly a serious biopic – it was a TV episode in a dramatised anthology called Urban Myths for Sky Arts, telling the apocryphal tale of Jackson embarking on a post-9/11 road trip with Marlon Brando (Brian Cox) and Elizabeth Taylor (Stockard Channing).
Caked in makeup to make Fiennes’s skin even lighter, it is possibly the only time an actor could be accused of both blackface and whiteface at the same time. Jackson’s daughter, Paris, tweeted at the time, “It honestly makes me want to vomit.”
“I think people are absolutely right to be upset,” Fiennes says now. “And it was a wrong decision. Absolutely. And I’m one part of that – there are producers, broadcasters, writers, directors, all involved in these decisions. But obviously if I’m upfront, I have become the voice for other people. I would love them to be around the table as well to talk about it. But you know, it came at a time where there was a movement and a shift and that was good, and it was, you know, a bad call. A bad mistake.”
Sky pulled the episode before broadcast, saying in a statement the decision was taken “in light of the concerns expressed by Michael Jackson’s immediate family”.
“And, just to say,” Fiennes adds now, “I asked the broadcaster to pull it. And there were some pretty hefty discussions, but ultimately people made the right choice.”
Perhaps because of his illustrious family name (the full version of which is Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes), or the fact he is related to the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes (his third cousin, once removed), or maybe just due to so many of his siblings having forged successful careers in the arts (his elder brother is the Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes), it is often assumed Fiennes grew up in privilege. It is not, as he’ll point out to any interviewer who’ll listen, remotely the case.
His father, Mark Fiennes, was a photographer, his mother, Jennifer Lash, a novelist. They had six children in eight years – Joseph the youngest, Ralph the eldest – and adopted a seventh. Money was tight. They renovated properties for extra income, moving 14 times in as many years as they hopped from one house to the next, leaving just as they made each a home.
Fiennes remembers one time his parents couldn’t afford to buy him a school uniform and so was sent to school “in an old raggedy pair of knickerbockers. It was some kind of Victorian costume. I remember saying: ‘I can’t go to Southfields comprehensive like this.’”
So if not for nepo-baby wealth and connections, just why have the Fiennes’s brood all found such success? Martha Fiennes is a director, Sophie Fiennes is a documentary filmmaker and Magnus Fiennes is a composer (Jacob Fiennes, Joseph’s twin brother, is a conservationist – there’s always one).
“I think upbringing has a lot to do with it,” he allows. “We weren’t privileged, but I feel privileged in the parents I had. Their love of literature, the arts, photography, film. But it was a love that came with discipline. Like, in debt, penniless, moving every year, but there’s another privilege, which I hope in turn I feed my children.”
Fiennes decided he wanted to be an actor aged eight – he was cast in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as Joseph – and found himself shot out of a showbiz cannon just a few years after leaving drama school, with two Oscar-nominated films (Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth) arriving in 1998. Notoriously he turned down a five-picture deal from Harvey Weinstein at the time. His subsequent career as a Hollywood leading man never quite lived up to its early promise.
Fiennes has given a few explanations for this over the years, ranging from wanting to return to his first love, theatre, to a fear he’d be forced to star in brainless blockbusters. More than once he mentioned The Dukes of Hazzard as an example.
I say this is a little odd, as we’re talking about Miramax in the late 90s, when they were at the peak of their Oscar-bait powers. Matt Damon signed a similar deal with Weinstein after the success of Good Will Hunting in 1997, and starred in Rounders, Dogma and The Talented Mr Ripley.
So what was the reason? Fiennes, deliberate and unhurried at the best of times, stops eating, and looks off to the side, letting a pause drift off into the distance. Eventually, he says, “I have to be careful here,” and is silent again. It’s decided that we’ll talk off the record briefly, and I turn my Dictaphone off.
What follows is illuminating, but perhaps not the blockbuster revelation I was expecting. I got the strong sense he was about to tell me an uncensored version that he then decided against. I ask if we can just talk on the record about it, and Fiennes agrees, but refuses to repeat what he just told me, though does agree I can paraphrase it.
The gist is this: he remembers being summoned to Weinstein’s hotel room and that, in describing the terms of the contract, Weinstein was aggressive, bullying and made it clear he would now be in charge of Fiennes’s career. Weinstein said some things Fiennes described as shocking, but he refuses to tell me exactly what. One thing, however, Weinstein made plain: if he didn’t take the deal, it would be very bad for his career.
“It was a bullying tactic that didn’t sit well,” Fiennes says with my recorder now running again, after pointing out he wasn’t remotely aware of the numerous #MeToo allegations that would later emerge. “The way he explained it was a shock to me. But I suddenly sat in the room very present, and happy and strong in myself to say, you know what, I’m not beholden to that. I’m stepping away.”
Does he feel Weinstein actively hurt his career following that decision?
“I don’t think it helped me. Hurt? No, maybe not hurt. But he made it clear that he won’t support me. He’ll make a very strong movement not to support me. I was out of the family. But I was very happy not to be in the family.”
For now, Fiennes has got the task of Southgate, and how to, as Graham put it to me, make kindness and decency “hit the back row of the theatre”.
Just before we met, I watched the tail-end of the day’s rehearsals. It was a scene where actors playing the England footballers each took to the front of the stage to introduce themselves. “Dele Alli, Spurs… Jordan Henderson, Liverpool…” When the actor playing Harry Kane stepped up, he put on a slightly exaggerated rendition of the England captain’s nasal twang, getting a big laugh in the room. Yet personally I couldn’t take my eyes off a glistening replica of the World Cup trophy, sitting on a table at the back. How thrilling and awful to see it, even in replica form!
As we walk out of the restaurant, Fiennes tells me that Southgate was initially baffled that they wanted to make the play about his tenure as England coach. After all, Southgate said, they haven’t won anything.
But surely that’s the point, I say. If England had won the World Cup, it becomes a sports drama, all about victory and success. But life is never like that: how you go about it is always as important.
“I think you’re right,” he says. “I think you’re right.”
Dear England is at the Olivier Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 until 11 August (nationaltheatre.org.uk)
Fashion editor Helen Seamons; photographer’s assistant Scott Hobson-Jones; digital by Nick Graham; fashion assistant Rosalind Donoghue; grooming by Carlos Ferraz at Carol Hayes Management using 111Skin
